Iulian Boldea, Dumitru-Mircea Buda, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MEDIATING GLOBALIZATION: Identities in Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, 2018 KINGSLEY AMIS: THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE YEARS Manuela Odeta Șopt-Belei Lecturer, PhD, ”Aurel Vlaicu” University of Arad Abstract: In the following novels Kingsley Amis moves away from the board scope of a society plagued by trouble to examine instead the troubles plaguing one of that society’s most fundamental institutions: relationships. The 1980s saw Amis returning to a very high level of accomplishment, with such novels as Stanley and the Women (1984), which created great controversy over its alleged misogyny: The Old Devils (1986), and Difficulties with Girls (1988). In 1986 he won the Booker Prize-McConnell Prize, the most prestigious literary award for British fiction, for The Old Devils, and he had been a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1981. In 1990 he published The Folks That Live on the Hill and The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990. Keywords: madness, relationships, uncertainty, alcoholism, anxiety As Amis began a new decade, he was well past middle age, as Anthony Burgess remarked entering into a new triumphant phase of his writing. One of the universal themes which has most engaged him, and about which he has a variety of things to say and show, is the relationship between men and women, both in and out of marriage. In his next four novels “Amis moves away from the board scope of a society plagued by trouble to examine instead the troubles plaguing one of that society’s most fundamental institutions: relationships.” (Salwak, 1992, 225) He takes up the conflicts, misunderstandings and drastically different responses of men and women to the world in Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils, Difficulties with Girls, The Folks That Live on the Hill. Something had been lost, and lost is at the heart of all of Amis’s novels, so that he is, as Malcom Bradbury calls him, “one of our most disturbing contemporary novelists, as explorer of historical pain.”(Bradbury, 1988, 216) His characters are not going to regain the old secure sense of meaning that their lives once held, and Amis does not pretend that they will. The question that Amis’s characters in his next novels tried is: What in the absence of an informing faith or an all-consuming family life could provide purpose for living? In the summer of 1981 Kingsley Amis was a man alone. His second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard had left him after a long period of mounting disagreement, while the sixteen- year marriage had begun in trouble. Amis had ignored the signs, preoccupied with his writing and reading and perhaps distracted by speaking engagements and other demands on his time. Among his activities, from 1984 to 1985 he would edit a poetry column in the Daily Mirror focusing on a different poet and poem five days a week, publishing a collection of verse, and edit a science fiction anthology. His search was slowed when in early 1982 he broke his leg in a fall inside his home. He ended in Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead for three weeks. This, along with a commitment neither to drink nor to smoke, a lot of antibiotics, led him to hallucinations in the night in his empty hospital ward. About this time the idea for Stanley and the Women drifted into his mind. “One moment I knew nothing: the next I knew it would be about a man with a mad son who breaks up his marriage.”(Spark, 1988, 13) Writing it was in part for him a matter of regaining his lost confidence, in part an escape from the outward and inward pressures of his Section: LITERATURE 301 Iulian Boldea, Dumitru-Mircea Buda, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MEDIATING GLOBALIZATION: Identities in Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, 2018 life. The novel took eighteen months and by autumn 1984 his new manuscript had grown to over 300 pages; a year later it was published as Stanley and the Women and was dedicated to Hilly (and in 1991 his Memoirs ). With the exception of Lucky Jim , nothing in Amis’s career would provide such an outpouring of intense reaction reviewers. Amis had had something to say in earlier novels, but never so provocatively as in this dark comedy. At one level Stanley and the Women is about madness, a subject that has always fascinated Amis. In most of his novels there is at least one example of an abnormal psychological stat, and genius madness, acute mental illness, it is an issue in three of them one in each of his three novels: The Green Man, The Anti-Death-League , and Jake’s Thing. It is known that for many writes as for Amis, it is the time when they are afraid of going mad, and he has occasionally consulted a therapist. To lose the use of this faculty, in Amis’ view, is to fall prey to excessive and irrational reflection upon the discrepancy that inevitably develops between hope and reality.(Salwak, 1992. 229) Amis distinguishes between “pseudo-madness”, which he calls “a fashionable defence against difficulties”, and real madness, which he considers “a good subject for fiction just because it is so intractable”. Of Stanley and the Women, he said: Steve’s illness can’t be made to correspond to anything that’s going on in other people’s lives. It’s a hopeless thing. It doesn’t tell you anything about sane people except how sane they are. And the effect schizophrenia has on other people’s lives interesting too. It’s pure, in that it doesn’t arouse difficulties of nursing: there are no physical consequences. It’s just that somebody suddenly becomes impossible, and I mean ‘suddenly’: the onset of schizophrenia is sudden and extreme… So the insanity of schizophrenia makes it useful as a fiction device.(Barber, 1984, 13) “Being mad includes laughing at things the rest of us don’t think are funny-the death of a parent for instance”, he says.(Salwak, 1992, 229) In his portrayal of Steve’s madness and the violent, unpredictable and very sad effects it has on those around him. Amis illustrates the depth of his understanding of abnormality. In a BBC profile of the author, for example, reminisces by his first wife and by long- time friends Edward du Cann, Claire Tomalin and George Gale, as well as Amis himself, helped to trace the development of his career from Lucky Jim to Stanley. The subject of women came up and Tomalin observed: Kingsley Amis has always been fascinated by women. But they’re always mysterious lovable, mysteriously to him. In his early books, they’re mysteriously lovable, mysteriously desirable. And he circled around them, trying to pat them, trying to reach them. And as he’s got older, as this novel have progressed, they have become mysteriously hateful, frightening, horrible… There seems to be sort of obsession with the nastiness of women. There is a sense of a man with a real problem, a man who really doesn’t know how to deal with women, but can’t stop worrying about them and wondering about them.(Bakewell, 1984, 1092) Section: LITERATURE 302 Iulian Boldea, Dumitru-Mircea Buda, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MEDIATING GLOBALIZATION: Identities in Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, 2018 In the first week of the publication of the novel, several outstanding reviews appeared in the major London dailies . John Carey write in Sunday Times : “If you are a middle-aged male chauvinist alcoholic you will enjoy this novel, and its narrator… will strike you as a perfectly normal and reliable chap”.(Carey, 1984, 16) J.K.L. Walker in The Times Literary Supplement called the novel “perhaps the most skilfully written of all Amis’ novels, and for much of its length the most overtly serious… [It] reveals Kingsley Amis in the full flood of his talent and should survive its ritual burning in William IV Street unscathed.”(Walker, 1984, 571) Stanley and the Women found its way on to the bestseller list, and was later named in two-year end surveys of the best books one by Anthony Burgess (“sharp courageous or audacious, very honest, and needless to say, very funny”) Bernard Levin (“implacably misogynist and hideously funny”) (Burgess, 1984) With the exception of Russian Hide andSeek, all Amis’s novels had been placed with an American publisher, usually six to nine months after the English edition had appeared. Now it seems to Hitchens that American readers were to be “cheated of a chance to get hold of a good book. Is there no publisher who will step forward to save the honour of the trade?”(Hitchens, 1984, 1310) The reason for not publishing Amis’s novel was that the Americans considered it “too English”, “too right-wing”, “too anti-woman”, “not good enough”.(Hitchen, 1984, 445) Articles in New York Times Book Review reported that British literary circles suspected that the apparent misogyny of Amis’s hero made American publishers timid about issuing a novel that might provoke feminist protest and therefore hurt sales. Jonathan Clowes, Amis’s long-time agent, confirmed this suspicious when he reported that he had shown the novel to three American publishers, all of whom had tried it down: At fits they were rather vague about the whole thing. It took a while to finds out, but when I pressed them on it, I was told that certain women on their boards were unhappy with the book. And I saw that as a form of censorship. (Saturday Review, 1985,19) Stanley and the Women found a home, a full year after its British debut, with Summit, a division of Simon & Schuster.